Who What Now posted:

Whenever I take even the slightest bit of effort

Who What Now posted:

To be fair, I might be more sympathetic to third-party voters if the third-parties weren't as bad or worse than the Democrats or Republicans. Not only are they voting for a worse candidate, but worthless and ineffective one as well. It's like saying you're too good to eat at McDonalds and then turning around to take a big bite out of a overflowing litter box.

Mrit posted:

I wonder which rereg this is... I put $5 on TEACHES.

NewForumSoftware posted:

What a retarded thing to say.

inb4 "ur a lovely person so i dont have to talk nice any more"

NewForumSoftware posted:

Yeah dude it was some real effort you were taking there to put words in my mouth I never said.

quote:

Truly you are a hardworking poster who is just misunderstood.

quote:

So, do you have any evidence that voting for HRC in California is a more moral choice than voting La Riva?

Who What Now posted:

You didn't say those literal words, you just said something that is functionally identical.

quote:

You don't care about evidence, so why should I bother casting pearls before willfully ignorant swine?

Who What Now posted:

You can take it however you want. The facts, however, remain the same.

Brainiac Five posted:

Leftier-than-thou people also love to insist that real minorities would never vote for a liberal, and that anyone who does is a traitor, so NewForumSoftware's crocodile tears are extra-special in that regard.

NewForumSoftware posted:

Why not argue with strawmen in a different thread? Or like in a private message chain with yourself?

Brainiac Five posted:

That's not a strawman, since I am not attributing it to you. I am commenting on your crybaby tears in the context of people insisting only white men and white women would vote for Kkkilarry Kkklinton, and although you will, as a pathological liar, deny the existence of this phenomenon, I have no desire to coddle you.

Brainiac Five posted:

It's not possible to derail a conversation that isn't happening. You cackle over your cleverness, other people yell at you, and then you tried to guilt-trip people when ya got called straight for whining about the LGBT rights movement having been coopted and turned away from the support of socialism. There is no conversation happening, so I might as well chuckle aloud about the stones you're throwing from a glass house, and how very USENET you're behaving. Can't wait until you complain about ad hominems, you chuckleheaded son of a billygoat.

NewForumSoftware posted:

I mean, if the phenomenon exists, why not at least point to it (spoiler: it doesn't) before you go into some bizarre derail talking about it?

Oooh, pathological liar, man, we're getting good now. Drop sociopath soon! Let your hate flow through you.

A Buttery Pastry posted:

I don't see the problem with how it is written, as long as you don't read it as "willingly and knowingly" funnels into whatever. They do funnel the outrage, but if a movement is co-opted then it has lost the ability to freely determine where that energy goes. Actually, it doesn't even need to be fully co-opted to be used to push policies which are only tangentially related, as long as someone can somehow sell the connection.

spotlessd posted:

How do you participate? Well, largely anonymously through social media and message boards like this one. The movement has already made it possible to participate through simple conspicuous consumption. Do you own an Apple product? Because that's half the battle right there. I'm mostly joking when I say this but if you want to spot the cops at a real-world rally just look for the people with stupid highlights in their hair. The list of vaguely lefty-seeming alternatives to ordinary products is endless. What kind of car do you drive? What kind of food do you eat? What music do you listen to? What kind of movies do you support. This is a whole political domain and you don't ever have to step outside it to be "progressive", except of course on election day. How do people manage to feel self-righteous about this poo poo?

WampaLord posted:

Hang on, I'm gonna go ask the BLM protesters what kind of phone they have, and let them know they're not contributing enough to the movement.

What in the gently caress are you on about? Your tirades are tinfoil hat as gently caress.

spotlessd posted:

WampaLord posted:

He's getting arrested! Isn't that the ultimate proof of caring, Mr. "I got tear gassed and arrested while protesting?"

Or does his #StayWoke shirt invalidate the fact that he's actually trying to affect change? I thought your screed was more targetted at people who would buy that shirt and then do nothing else, this guy clearly went above and beyond the call.

spotlessd posted:

Is this a protest or a PR stunt and how do you tell the difference? I know what the difference is for me--I didn't get a loving paycheck when I got out of jail.

spotlessd posted:

Is this a protest or a PR stunt and how do you tell the difference? I know what the difference is for me--I didn't get a loving paycheck when I got out of jail.

WampaLord posted:

I give up. Have fun posting.

spotlessd posted:

Is this a protest or a PR stunt and how do you tell the difference? I know what the difference is for me--I didn't get a loving paycheck when I got out of jail.

SSNeoman posted:

I make an impassioned statement every time take a poo poo, that doesn't mean I'm right or insightful.


What "facts"? He is just screaming "both sides are equally bad", same as NewForumSoftware was not too long ago. Beyond that, he just goes into "the government is using civil unrest in order to get more rights" like a left-wing If we actually accept this logic, we'd never see an expansion of government ever because every government move will be scrutinized through a tinfoil hat lens.
What facts am I supposed to deal with? He's doing nothing but justifying his frustrations through conspiracy, and claiming that the only way to fix this is to enact perfect leftism after suffering through 4-8 years of a Trump presidency.

You understood why his point about throwing away your vote is stupid and why people don't vote because "~branding~", now do the same for the rest of his monologue.

WampaLord posted:

What in the gently caress are you on about? Your tirades are tinfoil hat as gently caress.

SSNeoman posted:

He might be an AI construct created in the crucible of Congress. We'll never know.

Ze Pollack posted:

Scrutinizing government expansion through a cynical lens is absolutely critical to do, my friend. Accept the costs if you must. Denying the costs exist is intellectual cowardice of the worst order. Always-on body cameras do, in fact, constitute a massive expansion of the surveillance state. It is not a coincidence that this was the most equitable solution to the problem of civil unrest among entrenched power structures. Nor was it the product of some broad government conspiracy! It just so happened the way to keep the most possible powerful people happy with the solution went right through your right to privacy.

A core flaw in video games, and in the liberal ontology spotlessd is so enraged by, is the belief that malevolent intent is required for malevolent outcomes. As most of American foreign policy for the last thirty years has demonstrated, this is magical thinking. Conspiracy is not required, and never was. All that you need is enough people looking to make sure the solution to a problem benefits them, personally, and the path of least resistance to addressing racial unrest becomes "make every police officer a walking, talking, always-on camera." Have enough people looking to cover their asses, and the path of least resistance to the National Security Consensus becomes "bomb Yemen until the Saudis tell us we can stop."

It does not matter what the people involved -intend- to do, and has never mattered. What matters are the results.

If you believe the massive expansion of the security state involved in body cameras is a cost you're willing to pay to cut down on police killings, then make that argument.

Pretending that a cop making eye contact constituting consent to be recorded is not a change in the status quo is a non-starter.

Ze Pollack posted:

Scrutinizing government expansion through a cynical lens is absolutely critical to do, my friend. Accept the costs if you must. Denying the costs exist is intellectual cowardice of the worst order. Always-on body cameras do, in fact, constitute a massive expansion of the surveillance state. It is not a coincidence that this was the most equitable solution to the problem of civil unrest among entrenched power structures. Nor was it the product of some broad government conspiracy! It just so happened the way to keep the most possible powerful people happy with the solution went right through your right to privacy.

A core flaw in video games, and in the liberal ontology spotlessd is so enraged by, is the belief that malevolent intent is required for malevolent outcomes. As most of American foreign policy for the last thirty years has demonstrated, this is magical thinking. Conspiracy is not required, and never was. All that you need is enough people looking to make sure the solution to a problem benefits them, personally, and the path of least resistance to addressing racial unrest becomes "make every police officer a walking, talking, always-on camera." Have enough people looking to cover their asses, and the path of least resistance to the National Security Consensus becomes "bomb Yemen until the Saudis tell us we can stop."

It does not matter what the people involved -intend- to do, and has never mattered. What matters are the results.

If you believe the massive expansion of the security state involved in body cameras is a cost you're willing to pay to cut down on police killings, then make that argument.

Pretending that a cop making eye contact constituting consent to be recorded is not a change in the status quo is a non-starter.

Brainiac Five posted:

But at the same time, concluding that any efforts short of completely dynamiting the police system and starting from scratch (and it's difficult to see how the current police system, which is based on enforcing the prejudices of the powerful, could be reformed away from systemic violence against minorities without eliminating that root basis) are a failure means, in turn, either rejecting any changes short of full ones or demanding that activists accept they're going to do nothing but gently caress up until some point in the future where they can achieve something positive. The first is inhumane, the second a recipe for clinical depression, unless of course the conditions are ripe for revolution and overthrow and we just don't see it.

spotlessd posted:

I specifically said it proceeded along the same channels as all the other advances in police militarization? That's not about malevolent intent, although the 60's expansion of police funding was explicitly conceived as a political response to the civil rights movement, just as the war on drugs was specifically designed to defund the anti-war movement. This is an actual matter of public record. Another delightful revelation to come from the Nixon tapes, if not mistaken. I don't know why, apart from being extraneous to the broad political support bodycams enjoyed, you can't imagine their development in the same light as other programs that just plain old give boners to the intelligence community. The support for bodycams at the federal level does actually require some non-trivial explanation, I think, since DHS will almost certainly be footing the bill for wide-scale deployment. Part of the economic math involved in almost all police hardware at the state and local level is the assumption that Federal grants will do most of the heavy lifting.

Ze Pollack posted:

One hundred percent agreed! You have to take a look at which of the suboptimal approaches available is best in the given circumstance. And you may well come to the conclusion that personal privacy is an acceptable sacrifice to increase the chances that if a powertripping police officer kills your rear end he sees some kind of punishment for it.

Ze Pollack posted:

Trying to paper over that pretty damned contentious statement with "if you disagree with me, you are a video games" is a profound exercise in intellectual cowardice.

SSNeoman posted:

It's a far cry from suggestions of a surveillance state though. And if you say it is, you are exaggerating.

SSNeoman posted:

Oh poo poo look who's suddenly going "why're you so pedantic, man?"

Where was all this good poo poo when Hillary wasn't a real leftist?

SSNeoman posted:

It's a far cry from suggestions of a surveillance state though. And if you say it is, you are exaggerating.


Don't be so upset, it's just nature, running its course

Pedro De Heredia posted:

The reason you shouldn't vote for a third party is because voting for third parties does not appear to have actually helped grow third parties in any meaningful way in decades.

Ytlaya posted:

The biggest fallacy a lot of people like spotlessd and NewForumSoftware seem to be making is that they're using the following logic: "Democrats are focusing on social issues but are not focusing enough on leftist economic policy; ergo they are wrong to focus on social issues."

The obvious problem with this is that focusing on the latter is unrelated to not focusing on the former. Like, given those circumstances, the problem is merely "Democrats aren't focusing enough on leftist economic policy", and the fact that they're focusing on a different good thing (social issues) isn't what's stopping them from focusing on the other issue (since it's possible to focus on two things at once). It's like if you asked someone to buy you bread and milk at the store and they returned with just the bread and then you complained about them buying the milk.

I can actually sort of understand why someone would end up coming to this conclusion, since there's some truth to the idea that the Democratic Party has redefined American leftism as being primarily socially (as opposed to economically) progressive*, but that still doesn't in any way mean that being socially progressive is bad or undesirable (or that the Democrats aren't doing anything to help economically, for that matter).

Of course, there's also a passively racist element to this, where many white male leftists don't value social issues as highly because they don't personally stand to benefit as much.


* For example, another poster (I believe "stone cold") mentioned that this would be the most progressive Democratic platform in history, and I imagine they were saying this because it's the most socially progressive platform in history, but it's probably not accurate to say it's economically the most progressive. The social progressivism is just the first thing that comes to mind about the Democratic Party (and liberals in general) for most people.

Taerkar posted:

1) Your base that will vote for you and will show up. You don't want to lose these people
2) Your base that will vote for you, but doesn't always show up. GOTV helps a lot of with these people.
[snip]
People who voted for Bernie in the primaries and are now supporting Hillary have done a lot more to shift the Democratic Party further left than those that voted for Bernie but are now feeling the Johnson or feeding Stein's ego.

Ze Pollack posted:

That your understanding of what a surveillance state is is based more on Watch_Dogs than on what the term means in reality is not, I must point out, on us.

spotlessd posted:

Wanna know a secret? I don't actually care that much about individual economic issues. Not in America, at least. Imperialism and the police state are my political interests, and mostly just imperialism because its a) actually possible and necessary to resist within American borders and b) its the valve that needs to be closed before any other kind of politics can succeed. I just don't see how the kind of consciousness necessary for various redistributive platforms can become widespread while cheap gas and foreign labor continue to sustain our national standard of living. Probably a topic for another thread, but while the Iraq anti-war movement failed at a lot of things (including the fact that it degenerated into another loving culture war that elites easily seized upon and co-opted--shock), it did succeed in developing the next stage of the game at the level of activism. I'm not a huge Graeber fan but his book on Occupy has a good chapter on how global justice and anti-war movements were at least able to make it more difficult for the political class to operate and created new avenues for opposition. That's like one tiny opportunity for left politics that isn't just a miserable wasteland that I don't feel like I have any choice but to cling to.

spotlessd posted:

As to the rest, its just slightly backwards. Democrats didn't "redefine" left politics along social over economic lines, at least not in the sense that I think you have in mind which is like, discursively. What I mean is, it wasn't pollsters and pundits and campaign managers engineering this shift in consciousness. The liberal tendency is to think everything works like this, right? It's all about information, ignorant people vote worse, and it all starts with education and media and institutions that used to work but they're corrupt now and that's why stupid Republicans vote against their interests. In other words, you change the politics by changing the dialogue. But it was neo-liberal policy, following technical innovations, that changed the politics. Conditions, conditions, conditions. The interest in social and identitarian issues has more to do with the total end-run around labor that was affected by globalization than any deliberate manipulation of American voters. There are fewer and fewer economic issues, so far as labor is concerned, because economic issues are now foreign policy issues. Social issues ceased to be impossible because America no longer depends on a permanent underclass defined along race and sex lines. Exploitation occurs increasingly along national lines, right? There are exceptions, notably prison labor, but the new labor issues are service economy issues and honestly no one even gives a poo poo. I know committed, die-hard ML types who just kind of shrug about Uber. This was the colossal, maybe final, defeat from which the current "social issues" platform emerged and I don't feel the least bit uplifted or optimistic about where that species of politics can proceed from here.

spotlessd posted:

I have to insist upon this because its the most prevalent and egregious example of redbaiting horseshit in an election where the perfidious hand of Russian sleeper agents is thought to be tugging at strings: it's not a question of priorities. There is no real question that if the issue actually did come down to a social vs. economic platform but within the constraints of neoliberal ideology and presidential elections, the "left" course would be to move along race and sex lines. The problem, rather, is that where there was once a vibrant, radically egalitarian political sphere that flourished in communities affected most severely by racial and sexual inequality, there sits now a vacuous, consumption and pop culture-driven version of neoliberalism and ritualized privilege checking rooted in only in radical individualism and market logic.

spotlessd posted:

Some people choose to see this development as a thoroughly justified and historically inevitable victory of social over economic priorities. I sincerely doubt that's the case. There are better explanations for the here and now of left identitarian politics that don't rely on fundamentally mysterious notions of "progress". Besides which, I find it difficult to ignore the fact that the privilege discourse circulating among progressive circles today is mostly just borrowed from a body of academic jargon and theory produced by people who lead radically different lives than the majority of those with whom they assert a shared identity. Who is this for? After a certain point its just baffling. You have SSNeoman prostrating himself in this very thread, saying "I'm just a clueless bitchboy please hate me". Who is actually so self-absorbed as to respond positively to this obvious suckup idiot worm?

The modern discourse on identity politics is just crawling with people who are so loving brittle and precious and wounded and introspective its hard to imagine them prevailing on any issue that actually requires sustained activism. I can get on board with a social issues platform but I have to be able to understand how its actually better than the politics that it displaced. So far its just excruciating. It's tempting to put off this argument and just say "welp see you in 8 years" because its so emotionally charged but I can't escape the feeling that the Obama administration already tells you everything you need to know about whether anti-racist politics get better results when they're trendy and neoliberal vs. militant and red.